


Found and Lost

by Dribbledscribbles



Category: The Magnus Archives
Genre: Be advised: This one's going to Hurt+, Had a terrible thought and decided to share, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:28:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26301175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dribbledscribbles/pseuds/Dribbledscribbles
Summary: Dr. David had a new patient.This was quite impossible, of course. Every patient that was intended for Wonderland’s hospitality had appeared in their rooms the moment the Change took hold. There were thousands of names on his clipboard and they’d all been accounted for from the very start.And yet, therehewas. New, yet somehow familiar. Odd, that. But ultimately unimportant.He stepped inside and the session began.
Relationships: David Ramao/Andre Ramao
Comments: 32
Kudos: 80





	Found and Lost

_Brief_ , thought Dr. David. So _brief_ , his latest visits with the patients. 

Oh, he always made sure they felt longer than they were, but the feeling of a thing is not the thing itself. Under other circumstances, he’d have stopped to savor his rounds. Really get into the meat of his languishing flock’s minds; or perhaps just the actual meat if he ran into someone with a fear of the old school methods. A dash of electrotherapy here, the tap-tap- _tap!_ of a lobotomy there. It wouldn’t last, naturally. The foolish things would spring right back to square one the moment the pain and dread responses fizzled out. 

But for now, it was strictly the hopelessness that nailed them all in here with good old Dr. David and his charming orderlies. All neatly bolted and pilled and needled into their individual boxes, weeping for some atom of belief, of respite, of agency. 

Ha.

Darling idiots all. It was almost like teaching toddlers—no grasp of reality or desire to grasp it in the first place. 

Had he been a teacher before now? Dr. David wasn’t sure. There was just a great wall of dizzy, spiraling vagueness when he tried to picture his time before Wonderland. Fear? Yes, a great deal of that. A certainty that he had lost something important as surely as he himself was lost. Confusion had been there too. Turns and turns and turns. Not even the distraction of sore feet and starvation to anchor him. Just a labyrinth that was at once a mercilessly shifting kaleidoscope and the folds of some inscrutable brain that may have been his own—

Until he became a doctor, that was. Dr. David.

How long had he been himself? Again, some oddness there. The facts were out of time and out of mind and far, far out of reach of his urge to care about such silly things as facts.

He had been a doctor before Wonderland, he knew he was supposed to know that. Before the Change. Yes, he had helped _many_ patients before then. Some had even made the transfer here to Wonderland! He was glad of that. He’d have hated to lose all that progress over a promotion and relocation. Now they couldn’t even escape treatment by ending themselves—such an improvement. It was always so disheartening when the poor things went for their veins or choked down whole orange bottles to flee from the reality he tried so hard to explain to them.

None of that anymore, thank you very much. His flock would be here until the far end of forever with Dr. David as their caring shepherd. 

Ha! 

Ha.

He had been relishing it for a while; insomuch as one could judge the length of any sized ‘while’ anymore. Visits could last hours or days or weeks or months depending on how much Dr. David was enjoying the session. Why, he’d helped a patient for two years straight just the other day. Whichever day that was. Oh yes, Dr. David knew how to take his time when he felt like it. He’d been parsing out plenty of time before.

But now? Oh, now it was different. Now something absolutely wondrous had occurred.

Dr. David had a new patient. 

This was quite impossible, of course. Every patient that was intended for Wonderland’s hospitality had appeared in their rooms the moment the Change took hold. There were thousands of names on his clipboard and they’d all been accounted for from the very start.

And yet, there _he_ was. Just like that. His own room, his own restraints, his own diagnoses. Odd, that. 

He’d brought it up with the head of the facility. Well, more a Hand of the facility, considering. The offshoot of the Spiral in charge of Wonderland and all its coordinated locales across the whole wide world. Helen, they called themselves these days. Michael had fallen out of fashion since Dr. David last encountered them. Back when he…did something. 

It didn’t matter.

“Has this patient always been with us?” he’d asked, gesturing vaguely at the man’s door. Helen had pondered it with the coils that should have been eyes. The knife blade of one finger tapped her chin and broke it into ornate curls. And she'd smiled, because she always smiled.

“Hm. I suppose he must have been. Wouldn’t be here otherwise, would he? Don’t tell me you’re slipping, Doctor.”

Dr. David had grinned back, knowing the old game frontwards and backwards and sideways and inside out. He’d played it many times with Michael. Almost as many times with—with someone else. Someone unimportant; a cipher with no face and no name. So Dr. David put on his own face, one of hundreds, and smiled back.

“No more than you are, I’m sure. Do you really think anyone’s buying your act, incidentally? The one where you’re just oh-too-zany and kooky to be bothered by the inevitable turnabout?” He winked with an eye that was only superficially his. “How _is_ your dear friend from the Web doing, by the way? She is pulling only the right strings for you, isn’t she? Not getting bored of you and your less-than-convincing pep talks with the Archivist?”

Her smile turned into a sickle, but never dropped. A dropped smile was a loss.

“She’s lovely, Dr. David. We both are. On the same note, how is your husband doing?”

“As soon as I find one, I’ll let you know.”

They’d bared their teeth at each other another moment before tiring of the game. Another stalemate, as per usual. They both had better things to do.

Dr. David had stepped inside and met the patient. He was—

He’d been—

It—

_Stop,_ Dr. David thought, his new hand fidgeting and slithering around the door handle. _You’re a professional. You’ve handled far more difficult cases than his. Act like it._

Granted, it wasn’t especially professional to rush through the heap of other patients just to skip ahead to this one; this black sheep of the flock. But it wasn’t as if they were going anywhere, were they? No, they weren’t. Not between the bonds and the meds and the orderlies. Plus, it was vital that he tamp down problematic patients like this one. The fact that a patient was even capable of being problematic was as impossible as…well, having a new patient. It was the sort of thing that might spread to others in his poor herd, rile them up, agitate the group.

He couldn’t have that. Goodness, no.

This was a patient that required additional aid. Close and thorough examination.

Yes. 

“Yes,” Dr. David informed himself. His hand solidified on the handle. He stepped inside.

There he was, same as always. Bound to the bed. He’d not gotten out of it once in the many, many years Dr. David had injected into their past sessions. Hadn’t even tried. Just laid there and stared and, in between a few cursory blurbs about his life, listened to Dr. David talk, objecting to nothing.

And oh, Dr. David had talked until his lungs collapsed and his tongue wore through and all his faces went stale with clinging to the swirling mass that kept them pasted on. The funny thing was, Dr. David couldn’t recall what it was they’d talked about the moment he left the room. It didn’t even linger long enough in his memory to be worth a chuckle. Nor did he recall any tears, any screams, any thrashing, any pleading, any… _anything_ laugh-worthy from the patient. 

The list of things he _did_ remember from their decades’ worth of sessions was short. 

The patient was sad. The patient was calm. The patient was afraid—but not for himself.

Made for some rather dull notes, if he was being honest. Frustratingly dull, apart from the last point that remained ever-unchanged on his clipboard.

The patient did not hate or fear Dr. David. The patient—and oh, this should have made him laugh, it really, truly should have— _pitied_ Dr. David. So much so it bordered on mourning. The sensation radiated from the man’s head like melancholy sunshine. Dr. David might have suckled on it like a happy tick if not for how bizarre the taste was. Like going to drink a cup of coffee, expecting sugar and cream and a sickening dose of caramel, and finding it coldly bitter.

Had he enjoyed coffee before he was Dr. David? He thought he might have. Someone had brewed pots for morning and night, always up early to prepare the mugs. Whoever Dr. David had been before he was Dr. David, he’d had a voracious sweet tooth. The preparer of the mugs always made sure to put a candy bar’s worth of sugar and caramel in, plus enough cream to nearly bleach the caffeine away. Proper cream, too—not just milk or water. 

“—I pocketed little creamer packets whenever I attended some upscale auction and brought them home. He’d always gasp and call me a thief. Even as he proceeded to steal them off the counter and pour eight of them into a single cup.”

“What? Sorry?” Dr. David cleared his throat, slathered on some indifference. “Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. Did you have anything worth saying, or can we skip it?”

“Of course we can skip it, Doctor. It’s clear there’s no point in it.”

“I—yes. Yes, that’s quite perceptive of you. A marked improvement.” 

Dr. David glanced down at the clipboard, mildly surprised that he’d been writing anything down. His ‘notes’ were almost almost squiggles and curlicues that writhed on the paper in grinning fractals. This time, however, there were actual shapes involved.

Hearts. Beating and bleeding in red ink that was not ink. Strange.

Stranger still, he had no pen. 

“Sorry about your pen,” said the patient. Dr. David looked up. Whatever organ had twisted through his ribcage to replace his heart, it jumped. Ditto the stand-ins for his stomach and throat.

The patient was no longer strapped to the bed. The patient was sitting on its edge, his back turned to Dr. David, his head hung low in either dejection or concentration. Out of sight, Dr. David heard the scritch-scratch of a pen on paper.

“Give that back immediately, Andy.”

“Is that my name?”

“Of course it is. Always has been. Now give me the pen before I have someone take it from you.”

“I wish I could. I’d use my own, but I’m afraid—ah. There it goes.” Before Dr. David could ask what he meant, the patient—Andy? Andy.—lifted his right hand without turning around. Empty.

“Oh, how very clever. You can hide a pen up your sleeve.”

“Wish it were that simple. In a way, I guess the reality is still simple, just…wrong. Quite wrong. Like everything else about me.”

“Ah, another point to Andy. Making leaps and bounds today, aren’t we?” Dr. David gave his current face’s most winning smile. It creaked on his jaw, but steadied when he pulled out his best lie: “More days like this and you’ll be out of Wonderland in no time.”

The patient who was probably Andy only sighed.

“Sooner than you think, Doctor.”

“Oh? And why do you say that, Andy?”

Dr. David oozed into the man’s skull to check for himself. It was always best to have material to contradict ahead of time. But when he got inside and looked around with his eyeless feelers, he found it was—not confusing, per se, just annoyingly patchy. Like a road that was more pothole than asphalt. Pieces clearly missing, new pieces piled up where they weren’t meant to be. There was no way to grasp a clear picture or thought or identity or—

“Do you like the flowers?”

“What?”

“The flowers. They’re new. Do you like them?”

Andy, quote unquote, was pointing to a corner of the room. His room, like all the others, was carefully featureless. No windows, no art, no color, no distractions of any kind; apart from a mirror or twenty in special cases. The better to prove to said special cases how infinitely ugly they were—exactly as they assumed. But, looking where that limp finger pointed, Dr. David saw the vase.

It had been there on other visits, he realized. Had always been there. He’d forgotten it every time, same as the bulk of their lopsided conversations. But it was familiar in a deeper way. Something about the design, that infinitely precise geometry in the blue of it, so fine, so endless—

_A hand on me,_ Dr. David thought inanely. _A great pale Hand closed around me, all of me, and pulled me down inside. And I was lost. And he was lost. Whoever he was._

But the vase didn’t hold his attention long. Not when he had the flowers to see.

A massive bouquet of sick-looking bluebells. Bluebells that weren’t exactly right, the more Dr. David looked at them. They seemed more like sketched imitations of bluebells; an illustration done by a disturbed artist.

“Can’t say _I_ like them,” the patient hummed as if Dr. David had answered him. “I had a husband, I may have told you. He rather preferred daffodils. Eye-watering yellow was his favorite color.”

“Assuming you—you even had a husband. We’ve gone over this before, he simply did not exist. I know you know that.”

The words came with the ease of negation—simple as breathing. Dr. David even smiled as he spat them up. Yet every syllable tasted like rust. Worse, the patient did not even look at him. Why wouldn’t the miserable prick just _look_ at him?

“I would prefer you look at me when I’m speaking to you, Andy.”

“I’m sure you would. You know, my husband was a bit like you, once upon a time. I loved him—still do, I should say—but I always did pity those who got on his bad side. The man had a _remarkable_ mean streak when he zeroed in on some jackass who needed the wind taken out of their sails. He taught kindergarten, for God’s sake, but he could cut a body to ribbons with his tongue. Once took about ten years off this pucker-faced Tory woman haranguing the teenager who couldn’t take her damn coupon. Downright Shakespearean, he was.”

Dr. David opened his mouth.

“Leagues beyond you and your amateur hour bullying. He’d eat you for breakfast.”

Dr. David’s mouth stayed open a moment longer. Then his face started to slip. And to curdle. He ironed it out into a grimace with the corners pinned up.

“Is that a fact?” He couldn’t pry any deeper into the man to know one way or the other. Still, he had enough to go on. “I ask rhetorically, of course, because I know that whatever this figment of a spouse may have been in your pathetic daydream of marital bliss, I assure you, my tongue could skin him quite easily. But we don’t operate in hypotheticals here in Wonderland, Andy. We operate in facts and nothing else. And the fact is, you need very serious help if you still persist in trying to sell this manufactured happy home life of yours. Perhaps I spoke too soon about the release. It’s clear you need a far more thorough round of treatment. Not to worry, though—,”

“Because good old Dr. David isn’t going anywhere. Yes. I’m aware.” Only half-seen, something square, flat, and brown was flipped over in Andy’s hands. Paper crinkled. “You really aren’t, are you? You’re as bolted down to this place as the furniture. I’d thought maybe—maybe, since my memory is still intact, it would do something. Be contagious, somehow, sever the grip of this place. But no. That’s not how this works, I guess.” Another sigh fell out of him, this one heavy enough to physically shake him. If Dr. David didn’t know better, he’d think…

Another sigh. Another full-body shudder.

_There_ it was. The first signs of an oncoming sob. Progress at last.

…And yet, Dr. David found his smile slipping further. There was something in the sound of it—some unique note—that pierced a hole in him and let a terrible, red wretchedness pour out in a geyser. All the bliss of misery drowned under the tide of it and it was—he couldn’t—

_Last time I saw him like this was when he had to close up the shop, he’d put so much into it, one of the youngest men in the game, been underestimated by all the greybeards, but he’d done it in spite of them, he knew what he was doing, loved what he did, put so much love and work and sweat into the field and the shop, and then the recession just cut it all out of him, just like that, and he was there on the bed, sitting with his back to me, trying to cry in silence so he wouldn’t wake me, wouldn’t break the illusion that his upper lip was still stiff, it’d be alright, the antique business just wasn’t what it used to be, ha ha, but he wasn’t alright, he was crushed, he was weeping and he didn’t want me to see, didn’t want me to worry or—oh, evilest epiphany—didn’t want me to think he was weak for it, something to deride and mock, and oh, it nearly killed me to think he would fear such a thing, and we spent the whole night locked around each other, him mourning that new-old shop that barely got to breathe before it was euthanized, me mourning all the times he might have confided in me if not for the fear of me gutting him with a razor blade word, just held each other all night long, and by the morning, even though it was all still awful and uncertain, it was a misery we could shoulder together, and he made us our coffees, and it tasted so goddamn good, better than it ever had before—_

“Medication,” Dr. David said before he’d even decided to speak. “You—you need to take your—,”

His spare hand started to fill with the familiar plastic of a prescription bottle as he said it. 

“You don’t even know my face, do you, doctor? All these years that didn’t exist in this pointless room, years you crammed down its stupid square throat trying to understand why I make you feel the things you feel, and you can’t even remember what I look like. Let alone my name.”

Another sigh, another shudder, and yes, there was the sound of tears. 

It felt like knives going through the place that once held his heart. 

Dr. David’s hand snapped tight around the bottle. Painkillers. Ludicrously strong. The sort that felt like a shot of pure euphoric delirium while they lasted and sent the user crashing down into a withdrawal so titanic in its monstrosity that the Spiral had trouble keeping up with the inventions of the patient’s mind. Quite a fun prop when used correctly.

In this case, however, Dr. David foresaw himself using it incorrectly. He would clamp a funnel between this patient’s teeth and shovel mountains of the pills down. Followed by several IVs of the facility’s version of ‘morphine.’ Enough to dissolve the man into a laughing, drooling, harmless puddle of idiot-glee. While he was in the room, at least. Once he left, the ecstasy would go with him. Let the man howl his lungs out in private. Yes. 

Ha, ha, ha!

Ha…

_A decade’s worth, then,_ Dr. David thought, willing the bottle in his hand to turn bottomless in its contents. _Two, even. Or three? Four? Five? How about ten? A nice even century. Just me and him and the antithesis of that horrid noise he has in place of ordinary crying. He’ll laugh, he’ll smile, he’ll look at me. For a whole lifetime and more, he’ll be so very, very happy with me. Beg me not to go. Perhaps I’ll let him think I won’t. If he renounces this so-called imaginary husband of his. If he admits it was all a lie, a desperate fiction to cover the fact of his own loveless reality. If he says he did not have a husband and never deserved the one he made up. If he tells me all he needs is Dr. David. Because that’s the truth, isn’t it? Oh, yes. I’m all he’ll ever have or ever need until forever dies, and we will live here, him and I, for another thousand years’ worth of artificial bliss, and he will scream at the thought of me leaving, and maybe I will scream along for the sake of doctorial support, and hold onto my laughter until I’m out the door. Ha!_

Except he wouldn’t, would he? He’d forget to laugh all over again. Pity.

“You don’t need a face or a name, really,” he said as he rose from the chair. “‘Andy’ was just a courtesy. You only get such identifiers as a memorable face or name when you’ve earned them. They’re rather finicky things in my experience. Slippery. They only come to those who deserve them, who are willing to accept the reality of things, who follow their doctor’s orders like a good patient. And your doctor, your dear Dr. David, says it’s time to take your medicine.”

He rattled the bottle. 

The patient paused in his infuriating sob-sighing. He slumped forward even further, refusing to turn around. 

“Look at me. You turn and you look at me right now, or I’m afraid whatever privilege you were given in being allowed out of the bed will be revoked.”

“You haven’t noticed, have you? The straps.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been strapped down the whole time I’ve been here. Where are the straps?”

“You—th-there were never any straps.” Dr. David looked at the bedframe for confirmation. Sure enough, no straps.

“The same way there were never any flowers? Or a vase to hold them? I suppose I was just laying there bedridden because I felt like it all that time.”

“Yes. Because you were tranquilized.” It sounded right as Dr. David said it. Lies always did. “You were hysterical at the start. You needed the dosage. Made you far more palatable a conversationalist as an added bonus. Speaking of—,”

He took ponderous steps closer, making sure the bottle made as much noise as possible. The rattle of pills was synonymous with gunfire in his skilled hand. Patients recoiled from it at the slightest shiver of the plastic because it was always a surprise to them what was inside. But they always took it eventually. If they were too stubborn about it, well, it might just come alive and crawl down to their bellies on its own.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Doctor, but you’re wasting your time. More importantly, you’re wasting company time. If the vase is getting active, that means it’s getting impatient. Which means it’s time for me to go. Never can stay in the same spot long. It loves playing the Schrodinger game too much. I am gone and I am here, I am nowhere and I am anywhere. So long as a trade needs to happen. You’d be surprised how busy the delivery business has gotten during all this mess. All these little transactions taking place, even in the midst of a waking nightmare. I suppose I should appreciate having a job in this new arrangement. There’s a surprising amount of overlap between this and my previous trade; quite a simple transition. I even get to travel. Meet and horrify exciting new victims in exciting new hellscapes. They keep getting shocked by me, every time they look away. They forget. When they look again, there I am. And the screaming starts all over. Which is a shame. I’d much rather stop to talk with them, give them a break from whatever hamster wheel they’re trapped in, but no.

“It’s only things like us that have enough cognizance to sign for the deliveries. I do hope you have another pen—oh. Look at that.”

The patient lifted his hand. A new pen was there. Embossed on the side was a staring logo and a title: _The Magnus Institute._

“About time this came back around.” The patient stood. “I wonder if—,”

But Dr. David was not listening now. He was beside the man, quick and silent as lightning. He'd not need the orderlies to help him administer the prescription either. They were window dressing more than anything. Dr. David was always as strong as a patient’s needs required him to be. So it was with comical ease that he seized the patient by the shoulder, whirled him around, and prepared to feed him the whole tide of happy little pills.

Except.

Except there was something wrong. Many things, really, but the first thing that stood out was the man’s clothes. They weren’t the nonoptional stained gowns that the other patients wore. He didn’t even have a bracelet with his assigned name and number on it. Instead, he wore a uniform. The unassuming regalia of a deliveryman with the service’s name stitched at the chest.

_Salesa and Ramao Deliveries._

Dr. David was allowed only a moment to relish the quiet confusion of this discovery before he had to acknowledge the reality of the man’s face.

Namely, that there was no face at all. Where a face should have been, there was only a horrible, hollow endlessness. A chasm into a strange and empty place that starved with the desire to consume and steal away any good thing left unattended in its presence. 

As Dr. David stared into this abyss, the abyss stared into Dr. David. It saw what he cherished, hooked it, and began the painless agony of reeling it into itself to discard. At the very first tug, Dr. David knew what that precious thing would be. Just as surely as he knew he could not stand to lose it—not here, not now, not ever. It could have his spare faces, his bones, his whole shrieking head, anything, _anything_ but the piece he treasured most, poisonous and glass-jagged as it was.

But the fact that he was desperate to haggle so dearly for the thing was merely proof that the chasm had chosen just the right item to steal. It pulled. Slowly, so slowly, but with no intention of letting go. Of changing its mindless mind. 

And so, with every false eye weeping, Dr. David began to lose his amnesia. All of it.

“No, I need that. Please, I need it, I’m sure of it, I—I—,”

“No. Dr. David needs it—needed it—in order to be Dr. David. To not care. To not know better. The same way the Distortion couldn’t exist without eating out the innards of its hosts until they’re only a skin; a glove to wear on the Hand of the Spiral. For Dr. David to exist, you had to forget what you were inside him. Not that you’ll be able to quit once the process is done, of course. Too late for that. The Archivist has already come and gone and taken any chance of real, permanent death along with him. At least for the next umpteen millennia, when The End gets around to eating its siblings’ cattle. 

“I wish I’d gotten the chance to meet him. You hear a lot of gossip in this business. The way I hear it, the Eye hasn’t even had the decency to dope him up with sadism. Just lets him walk around feeling the guilt of it all. Knowing how much pain he’s causing, knowing he can only go on causing more, knowing there’s no way out. King of the whole shit-pile world, and he doesn’t even get to enjoy it. Seems like the type of apocalyptic Harbinger to offer a mercy kill as much as a vengeful smiting. But the business knows better, and it’s got me on contract until the death of the world. So, no Archivist visit for me. For either of us. I’m sorry.

“I’m so sorry, David.”

Something was nudged against Dr.—

Against David’s hand. The prescription bottle and clipboard fell as he grabbed them. 

“You need to sign for the delivery.”

A different clipboard. The new-old pen. Without knowing how or why, David’s hands moved on their own, as if pulled by invisible puppet strings. He scratched out a signature that he actually recognized. Clipboard and pen were taken away. A hard little square wrapped in brown paper and thread was put in their place. The sweat of his palms stained it.

“Give it to her next time you see her. If my guess is right, I think there’s more trouble in paradise between Spiral and Web than your supervisor would like anyone to think. You can only flub so many attempts at wheedling a target before it’s obvious you’re doing more harm than good. A snarl in the Design, as it were. I hope you get to see it happen, at least. I-I hope you—that you get—something out of this. Something. Anything.” 

The patient who was not a patient moved a step away. Toward the vase’s corner.

“No.” One of David’s hands left the package to clamp onto the man’s arm. “No, you can’t go.” Squeezed. Shook. “Please don’t go.”

“I have to. Mikaele is waiting for me on the other end; he always is, since that transaction that officially took him out of the human demographic and into ours. Paid his dues, whether he meant to or not, and the Stranger doesn’t allow for retirement. Promotion, but never retirement.” The chasm of a face turned away and tried to produce a laugh. “Funny how these things blend together, isn’t it? Spider into Spiral into Stranger. M-Maybe we’ll see each other again, if there’s another delivery, i-if—,”

“ _Andre._ ” The name was hot shrapnel in his throat. But it was right. May every kind god that never existed damn it, the name was _right_. “Andre, _please_ —,”

“I-have-to-go.”

He was twisting away now, no longer walking, but marching to the vase. Reaching out. David plastered himself to his back, bearhugging him with all his inhuman strength and every superfluous limb he could muster, becoming a tangle of medical horror and coiling anatomy, a Technicolor octopus grappling with some treasure found in the joyless ocean floor. 

“No! No, you can’t, please, you can’t, you can’t go, I can’t lose you twice, please, please, _please, Andre, please_ —,”

“David—,”

“ _I love you, please **don’t**_ —,”

“I lo—,”

But then the bluebells had been tossed aside. A large hand, old and padded with muscle, grew out of the vase to take hold of the deliveryman’s. For a moment, one could believe it was simply a surrealist’s depiction of a handshake. Then the hand in the vase pulled.

And then, because Andre Ramao no longer existed in Wonderland, his room failed to exist too. David Ramao stood in an impossible hallway, all his hands holding nothing but a flat brown package and empty, pointless air. 

He stood there for…he couldn’t count the minutes. Hours? A long while. But the memory refused to fade this time. In fact, it stood out crisper and brighter and more viciously vivid than ever before. The chasm-face of the deliveryman—the Cipher—

_Andre_ —

—had stolen all of his capacity for forgetting. And unlike the vase, it never gave anything back.

The vase. That fucking vase and the fucking monster inside it, inside these same fucking halls. And behind the doors of all these halls, patients. Still waiting for their torture. From him.

Because even if he was no longer Dr. David, he was still the Doctor. The Spiral’s stitched-in compulsion had not left him. His marching orders to inflict despair and dread were the same as ever. Implacable and unignorable. He was here to hurt under the guise of healing, to use his voice and his poisons and everything else at his disposal to whittle his victims down to wailing, begging animals, trapped in their pens.

Now he must do so without the illusion that he was not trapped too. Not even a ghost of transplanted cruelty to cloud it all. 

New rivers trickled down every layer of his faces. 

Somewhere a door creaked open. A giggle like a drill to the brain echoed out to him.

“So,” Helen hummed, “how was your patient, Doctor? He must have been much-improved if you let him waltz out of here.”

David looked at her. All the Twists and Distortions packed into that leering leather-mold of a woman who, if she was lucky, was long dead inside the parasite that had usurped her. 

His hand moved without his orders. The knuckles of it seemed strangely arched. On previous occasions, the hand had turned into hypodermic needles. Now it looked like nothing so much as an arachnid trapped in a disposable glove. This hand held out the package. Scrawled on the brown paper in large letters was: 

**_HELEN, FOR IMMEDIATE CONSIDERATION._**

“This is for you.”

She made some words at him. They broke into meaningless dust against his ears. His mind had hardened in the space of seconds. False reality and its voices had no more way in. He paid no attention until she, still laughing, slit the paper and unwrapped the package.

It was, of all things, a children’s book. Red pressboard. She laughed that drilling laugh again.

“Oh, this will make a _lovely_ prop for him. Nostalgia’s always a big draw in unsettling times, don’t you think so, Doctor..?”

She trailed off as she opened the cover. David read the title— _A Guest for Mr. Spider._ Her smile fidgeted and floundered as she turned the pages. 

She didn’t notice the stain on her door changing. The wan mucus tone giving way to something more arterial-colored. As David watched, it grew a set of porch steps. He could hear the phantom-sound of children playing. 

The Distortion was still turning pages. Still fighting to keep her smile up even as her face roiled and twitched with an understanding she refused to accept. Even as she turned. Even as she let her feet carry her up to the porch. 

In his best Doctorial timbre, David chastised her—gently, gently:

“It is polite to knock.”

Despite having her back to him, he knew the smile was gone.

Her long hand knocked against the crimson wood. 

_Knock-knock._

The door opened. There was a flicker of long, dark limbs and a shadowed infinity of silk inside. A noise from the Distortion, cut short. 

The door slammed behind her, and she was gone, taking the book with her.

David stared at the door, wondering if there might be a more palatable ending for himself on the other side. If he was allowed to knock. To see if maybe, maybe he could give his resignation if only he did so outside his appointed domain.

But he knew as soon as he hoped it that he was already dismissed. The red door disappeared as silently as it had come, leaving only a billowing flag of cobweb at the ceiling. David was still staring at it when he felt the Spiral tug at him again—nothing silky-subtle there—reminding him he had rounds to make. He did love making his rounds, didn’t he?

The Doctor had nothing he could say against it. He turned to resume work and paused.

The room where Andre Ramao had briefly existed was gone. Another room was in its place. A breakroom, of all things. The architecture was a headache to behold, of course, but it _was_ a breakroom. A shoddy little lounge with some malformed orderlies already skulking in it, gibbering in their nonsense-language among themselves, the better to give the impression that they had once been human instead of growing like mobile mold in the halls. They grunted at David as he entered.

“DlvryforyuDoc,” the one he’d named Brian said. The rest echoed him. “Dlvryforyu. Dlvry.”

There was. On the counter was a bouquet of daffodils with his name on it. 

And a still-hot mug of coffee made nearly colorless with sugar, cream, and caramel.


End file.
